ESPN announced on Saturday that it won’t air Spike Lee’s multi-part documentary about Colin Kaepernick, citing “creative differences.”
Lee told Reuters on Friday that the series would not be released. “It’s not coming out. That’s all I can say,” he said, declining to elaborate because of a nondisclosure agreement. “I can’t. I signed a nondisclosure. I can’t talk about it.”
The project was four years in the making, commissioned back in 2020 when corporate America was briefly interested in racial justice messaging. According to earlier reports from Puck’s Matthew Belloni, the seven-episode series, titled Da Saga of Colin Kaepernick, included “incendiary critiques of conservative politicians and Donald Trump” and “tackles the history of Black athletes in professional sports, as well as the larger cultural conversation around social justice and police brutality.”
Kaepernick hasn’t played in the NFL since 2016 after he started kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice. Many people believe he was essentially blackballed by the league for his activism, something that led to a collusion grievance that was quietly settled in 2019.
By October of last year, Belloni reported that ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro was open to letting Lee, Kaepernick, and producer Jemele Hill shop the series elsewhere. That ESPN was willing to let the project go suggests the writing was already on the wall regarding this project.
The NFL’s new ownership position creates a potential conflict. Under the deal announced on Aug. 5, ESPN acquired NFL Network, NFL Fantasy, and the rights to distribute RedZone in exchange for giving the league a 10% equity stake.
“ESPN, Colin Kaepernick, and Spike Lee have collectively decided to no longer proceed with this project as a result of certain creative differences,” the Worldwide Leader told Reuters in a statement. “Despite not reaching finality, we appreciate all the hard work and collaboration that went into this film.”
The project appears to be dead entirely. Whether that’s due to legal issues, unresolvable creative differences, or other factors covered by the NDA remains unclear.
Of course, the timing is hard to ignore.
As former Miami Marlins executive David Samson asked about the ESPN-NFL deal: “Do you think ESPN is going to spend hours of programming each day criticizing the NFL, bringing Jerry Jones to task? Do you think that there’s a possibility that ESPN will do anything to upset its partner, the NFL?”
Whether those concerns influenced this specific decision isn’t for us to speculate. But the optics of canceling a Kaepernick documentary weeks after the NFL became a business partner certainly don’t help dispel them.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.